In recent times, imaging technology has advanced with a tremendous pace. The rapidly growing portable electronics market, e.g. cellular phones, tablet computers, and PDAs, are an integral facet of modern life and has made imaging technologies ubiquitous and readily available.
Together with the development and supply of imaging technology, a need to utilize these low cost readily available imaging technology for analysis, diagnostics, and comparison purposes has arisen. Many fields have discovered a need for clear, accurate, consistently arranged, and time variant images. These fields cover wide implementation areas including construction management, insurance, and medicine.
In one example, external visual imaging techniques have long been an integral part of diagnosing and treating patient ailments. Some medical arts such as plastic surgery rely almost exclusively on visual end points and imaging.
Illustratively, scars and their healing are often characterized through a doctor's visual analysis of the patient's skin. A doctor monitoring the healing of a scar is primarily concerned with the size, shape and visibility of the scar at a given time as well as how the size, shape, color, and visibility of the scar are changing over time. Being able to review close up images, in greater detail, of the subject or relevant area are of equal importance.
Further, in the cosmetics industry, research scientists must visually study how make-up, creams (e.g. wrinkle and cellulite treatments), and other products affect the appearance of subjects over a course of treatment.
Yet further, pharmaceutical researchers involved in clinical trials must visually study experimental topical therapeutics to determine the efficacy of such therapeutics on patients suffering from various skin ailments. The results of such visual studies are then used to support regulatory filings with the goal of having such therapeutics approved for sale to consumers.
Since external visual imaging in the medical arts is concerned with the appearance and presentation of how certain structures on the human body are visually changing over time, both still and motion photography are vital tools for image acquisition, storage and analysis. There is a clear need to have appropriate tools to then analyze these images to look for changes and or structures that were not viewable upon first glance but merit closer analysis. However, the use of still and motion photography in the medical arts presents a unique set of challenges.
A primary challenge inherent in the use of still and motion photography is this inability to gain a closer analysis of images. While a still or motion image may provide information—often the ability to truly see change and make diagnoses may require the ability to more closely view an image in greater detail. When patients send and/or share images with their practitioner or any other healthcare professional, they lack the ability to know exactly what their practitioner will be focusing on in the image they send of themselves.
The common trait of these prior developments is the high level of training, skill, and work required to interface with the technology, manipulate images, and analyze regions of the images more closely. These prior developments in imaging are therefore expensive and time consuming to use.
Solutions have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any complete solutions, and solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art. Thus there remains a considerable need for devices and methods that can provide fast and intuitive image manipulation at a lower price point.